Comment Re:Microsoft Antitrust (Score 1) 98
No, you don't. You remember what the marketing men spun punitive damages as.
It was not an investment. It was not anyone saving anyone. It was Microsoft caught stealing and paying.
Read the link.
No, you don't. You remember what the marketing men spun punitive damages as.
It was not an investment. It was not anyone saving anyone. It was Microsoft caught stealing and paying.
Read the link.
Yeah, that's utter bullsh1t.
MS didn't invest in Apple. MS stole code from Apple, got caught, and settled out of court.
I've seen that claim loads of times -- it's all over Quora -- and it's a flat lie. It's credulous fools believing the marketing lizards' BS.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/...
MS is utterly amoral and ruthless.
It stole from Stac:
https://www.latimes.com/archiv...
https://tedium.co/2018/09/04/d...
It sabotaged DR:
https://www.geoffchappell.com/...
It screwed over Central Point:
https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topi...
It discussed how to "knife Netscape in the back":
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com...
Gates personally lied to the head of Aldus:
https://www.cringely.com/2013/...
He tried to screw his cofounder while the guy had cancer:
[Article author here]
> NT3.51 was perfectly viable for a workstation in its day
Yes it was. I used in in my day job at the time, on PC Pro Magazine.
But it was the 3rd release of NT and it came out 5 whole years after this product. At that time, given the speed of development of computing in the 1980s and 1990s, half a decade was almost an eternity. It was time for NT 3.1+ 3 service packs, then 3.5 + another 3 service packs, then 3.51, which itself got 5 SPs.
> the last version of Windows that prioritized reliability and security.
Arguably.
> Too bad about the 2GB filesystem limit
Only applied to FAT. This was before FAT32 was invented; it appeared with Windows 95 OSR2 in 1996.
NTFS volumes could be much bigger. You could create a 4GB volume during installation, but that's because it formatted as FAT16 (with nonstandard 64kB clusters) then converted it. But you could format the partition in advance with another OS, such as another copy of NT, and have NTFS partitions as large as the disk.
Do you mean Eric Raymond?
If you get the name of the co-inventor of the term "open source" right, rather than confusing him with a French videogame character, it will make your comment rather more believable.
[Article author here]
> How different?
Apple dead by the mid-1990s. No iPod, no OS X, no iPhones or iPads. No touchscreen handhelds, because all previous tablets flopped.
We'd probably be using Blackberry clones with tiny QWERTY keyboards.
Linux would look very different, because Win95 never came out. It might evolve into a Mac clone or a NeXT clone instead. (Which sounds quite good to me, actually.)
[Article author here]
> We used OS/2 1.6
No you didn't. No such release ever existed.
It went:
1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3... 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, 4.5 server.
[Article author here]
> How would it have "killed off Apple"?
Win95 nearly did kill Apple. A good desktop and good-enough multitasking and networking damn near sank the Mac.
This isn't the IBM OS/2 that launched in 1992. This is *Microsoft* OS/2 2 from two years earlier. MS had a properly multitasking 32-bit OS with networking support in 1990. If they'd launched it, before Apple even got to launching _System 7_, then the competition would have killed Apple much earlier on, before even the PowerMac line was launched.
[Laughs in Old]
Do you mean pre-emptive?
Windows 2 could pre-empt fine, but only DOS apps. It always did that. But Win16 and Win32 binaries got cooperative M/T until WinNT.
I wrote it. I'm not pretending anything.
BTW what country were you in? BBSes were not so big in the Sinclair homeland because we paid for all phone calls, including local calls, by the minute. BBSing was *expensive.* And Sinclair was a rounding error in N America.
Did you RTFA?
My whole point in writing it was to point out that there were over a dozen hardware compatible successor machines, 2 forks of the OS that made it over a decade and one well into C21.
How many other companies made Amiga compatibles, eh? Or 68k-based Mac clones? Or ST clones?
Put 'em all together and the QL still outdoes them all.
Only some extra ROM. It wasn't that bad.
It's decades since I submitted a story to
Article author and submitter here.
> Kudos to Tony Smith who understands the material and tells it well - looks like his last article there is 2016.
Yeah, he was very good but he's left the company now and works elsewhere in a field with far fewer deadlines.
This is too long but the less time I have the longer it gets.
Other vendors iterated the design, some quite successfully. Sinclair didn't get time to do so, partly because 2 weeks after the QL launched the shape of the whole industry changed.
Article author here.
> Itanium chips will be fab'd until 2025
I believe that this is completely untrue. As far as the Reg knows, manufacture ended in 2020.
With your bare hands?!?
